Not, this time, because of bonus caps, benchmark probes or liquidity ratios. No, this time it was a reminder that even the most high-profile bankers can be caught out by the human condition: Hector Sants, the former chief of the U.K.’s financial regulator and one of the top executives at Barclays, is taking time off for stress and exhaustion.

Who’s Hector Sants?

Mr. Sants is one of the most public faces of European financial regulation, having led the Financial Services Authority as chief executive between 2007 and 2012. He was a trophy hire for Barclays when he joined in January this year as head of compliance and government and regulatory relations. It brought Britain’s top gamekeeper to the bank that had long been seen as the industry’s most-aggressive poacher.

A spokesman for Barclays said today that Mr. Sants will step back from the post as until at least the end of the year.

Highlights include: probes of the bank by the Serious Fraud Office and U.S. authorities on its dealings with Qatar around two capital raisings in 2008; a battle with the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission over a $435 million fine for allegedly manipulating electricity prices; and a U.S. and European probe of the credit derivatives market. Then there was the $453.6 million fine by regulators over its alleged role in the Libor manipulation probe.

In early summer, Barclays was ordered by the U.K. regulator to raise fresh capital. Last month, it said it would contest allegations and a potential £50 million ($79.5 million) fine by the Financial Conduct Authority over the Qatar matter.

Sants’s own role at Barclays has come in for criticism too. Asked by Parliamentary Commission on Banking Standards whether he felt it to be an “ethically appropriate move” given Barclays’ wrongdoing on his watch at the FSA, Mr. Sants defended his decision to join the bank saying “These banks have got to change and one of the key issues that has to be changed is the culture, the behaviour and a credible compliance oversight process and I think I’m going with the intention of doing that. If I can do that I think I’m going to make a very significant contribution to the system.”

Hardly. He took over as chief executive in 2007 just as the financial crisis was beginning to take hold.

In 2008 under his watch, Northern Rock was nationalized in a move that occasioned Mr. Sants to promise the FSA would learn lessons from the lender’s failure. The same year, Mr. Sants attributed a £12 billion capital raising to prop up Royal Bank of Scotland to his “personal intervention”, and he warned the following year that bankers should be “very frightened” of the FSA because it had teeth. RBS failed and the majority fell into government hands.

In 2012 he underwent a roasting from lawmakers on the UK’s powerful Treasury Select Committee, who accused him of being asleep at the wheel at the FSA. He admitted I am truly sorry that [RBS] failed… I am truly sorry for all the small shareholders that got caught up in the financial crisis.”

Mr. Sants left the FSA with a bang. In his final weeks at the regulator, he hit Barclays with a £59.5m penalty for the bank’s role in the Libor scandal and said the regulator has found “serious failings” at Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland in the sale of interest-rate hedging products to small and medium-sized businesses.

Long hours, sometimes as many as 100 a week, and a lack of rest were the main reasons they cited.

That long-hours culture is facing its own headwinds too: recruitment experts said last year that they were having conversations with many talented candidates who might have chosen to work in banking but who were heading to the high-tech industry instead, where the work-life balance is considered more reasonable. It’s also cited as a common reason for women to leave the industry at a certain stage, not because they lack the talent or work ethic, but because the opportunity cost of not doing something else makes staying in the industry too high a price to pay.